


Safety First

by dinolaur



Series: 100 Bucky Feels to Counter 100 Tony Kills [12]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Gen, genderbent
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-18
Updated: 2012-11-18
Packaged: 2017-11-18 22:56:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,271
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/566195
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dinolaur/pseuds/dinolaur
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The origins of the Winter Soldier.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Safety First

**Author's Note:**

> Part of an unposted (haven't decided if I'll ever put it up) always a girl!Steve AU

Normal people don’t survive being frozen in ice for seventy years. Super soldier, sure, why not, but not normal people.

Which is why the Avengers and everyone with high enough clearance at SHIELD to know about one James Buchanan Barnes’s miraculous discovery alive in the Alps and in seemingly good health are left scratching their heads.

Steve, of course, is ecstatic. She can’t stop smiling, and she’s constantly hanging off Barnes’s good arm—the real one. No one will let Tony touch the robotic replacement, and that’s really just unfair—dragging him all over the Tower to show off all the new technology. Steve admits that although a lot of these things are commonplace, Tony’s skyscraper is beyond state of the art. Tony only preens a little bit at the praise.

Barnes takes a lot of getting used to. He’s gruff and old fashioned in that way that they were just beginning to really break Steve out of. Of course, he’s no Boy Scout, and he’s definitely less of that wholesome All-America that Steve oozes from every pore. He’s nowhere near as scandalized about the way people casually curse in everyday conversation—he only arches a brow the first time he hears someone say motherfucker. Steve had screamed—and he seems to really like the amount of leg that women’s clothing shows off—Pepper reports that Natasha had to put Steve into a headlock and bodily drag her away from the pantyhose section of department stores five times before the lesson sank in.

Barnes also isn’t very stealth about his disapproval of Tony’s existence. Steve tries to explain that it’s to do with Howard, and that was how the two of them had acted towards each other. She assures Tony that he’s not going to wake up one night to find Barnes standing over him with that rather impressive knife of his, but the glare Barnes shoots him over her shoulder says that Tony should makes sure to lock his floor down just to be safe.

Barnes being around means that Steve is suddenly spending less time hanging out with Tony. And while Tony doesn’t share too well—it’s not his fault; he’s a rich and spoiled only child—he gets it. Steve had missed Barnes. Missed him like a man in the desert misses water. For a long time, he had been the only family she had, and Tony can’t really begrudge her the freaking miracle it is for her to have him back. Even if he is jealous.

So Tony and Barnes do their circling dance of sizing each other up and making their stance on the other well known. It’s not dissimilar from before he and Steve started getting along—obviously, Tony just does not connect well with the older generation—but they work out a system quick enough. Basically, they act cordially when in front of Steve.

And Tony makes the executive decision very quickly that they need to never be in the same room when Steve isn’t around. If he has to replace another wall because of an over-protective Hulk out again, well, Pepper’s just sick of having to factor that into the budget.

The whole being frozen in a block of ice for seven decades is a pretty emotionally traumatic experience. Steve managed to convince Fury to let Barnes live in the Tower, but he’s still under surveillance and is expected to report to the SHIELD base in Manhattan every day for psych evaluations and tests to try to figure out how in the hell he’s alive.

Barnes is vocally against the psych evaluations and the shrinks’ insistence that he should be eased into everything. As far as Barnes is concerned, as long as he’s got Steve around, he’ll figure it all out, and any problems that arise, she’d be the best one to help him handle it anyway.

The whole how is he alive thing, that he’s a little more curious about.

The entire team tends to meander over to the SHIELD base and loiter around during the tests, despite that only Barnes, Steve, and Bruce—what with his biochem degrees and experience, however poorly it may have gone for him personally, working with super soldier serum experimentation--are actually supposed to be there. Steve doesn’t entirely trust Fury after the whole hiding plans to make weapons from old HYRDA tech thing, and Barnes refuses to cooperate on any tests unless Bruce, who Steve assures him he can trust, is in charge.

After a lot of hours—a good chunk of them spent with Tony pouring over Howard’s old journals—Bruce figures out that there’s something with an energy signal similar to the Tessaract that’s tainting Barnes’s DNA. They’re wracking their brains trying to figure out how it got in there and wondering if everyone shouldn’t submit a blood sample for evaluation—because with the whole Loki and Chitauri thing, they were all pretty well exposed to it—but then Natasha draws everyone’s attention away.

“James,” she asks, and they all turn to see that Barnes has dropped heavily into a chair against the wall. His face is pale, and it looks like he can’t really breathe. Steve is over him, one hand rubbing circles on his back and the other carding through his hair.

“What ails you, friend,” Thor asks. He’s trying to lower his voice, but it still rumbles.

“Steve,” Barnes says—more like croaks, “the factory—“

Steve inhales sharply. “Oh God,” she whispers, eyes wide. “You don’t think—oh, Bucky, I’m so sorry.”

“You’re sorry?” He lets out a chocked laugh. “Steve, if you hadn’t—he was still—God only knows what the hell he’d have done.” Steve’s blinking rapidly as she lowers her forehead to rest against Barnes’s temple. He still looks ashen, and Tony gets the feeling that they’re missing something here.

Missing something big, as it turns out. Tony knows a bit about Steve’s AWOL mission that resulted in her getting her own platoon from Howard’s stories. She’d heard that Barnes’s unit was mostly DIA or MIA after going up against HYRDA in Azzaro, and with Peggy and Howard’s help, she had busted them all out of a factory in Austria. Howard had never told his young son that Steve had found Bucky Barnes strapped to a table, beaten and dazed, in Armin Zola’s laboratory.

At the time, no one had looked too far into it, as Barnes has no memory of the event outside of pain. But now there are questions, and Fury puts Natasha on the job. Barnes insists on going in with her, and Steve wants to go too, but her German, while good, is mostly conversational. She’s half a wreck while they’re gone, and the team all pitches in ways to distract her from her pacing.

No one has ever been stupid enough to think Natasha isn’t completely ace at her job, and when they return, it’s with word that apparently Barnes is a freaking phenomenal super spy assassin type too. It’s kind of scary how fast they dig up seventy year old dirt that says that Schmidt and Zola were doing some secret business with the KGB and were looking to partially replicate the super soldier serum to make a batch of secret soldiers who would be doing some very, very dirty work. Tony’s there when Fury sees the initial report. He’s kind of glad he doesn’t really have the clearance to see what all is in that folder, because anything that makes Nick Fury’s face do that is something that probably makes normal people’s heads explode.

So Barnes is a partially programmed, almost-Russian super-spy. Clint makes a comment about In Soviet Russia, and he goes down pretty hard when Natasha and Barnes hit him at the same time.

A few days later, when Barnes announces that he wants to be part of the team, no one has any objections. He’s not quite as iconic as Captain America, but kids all learn about Sergeant J. B. Barnes in schools too.

Fury wants him on a probationary period that no one on the team intends to enforce. Tony’s actually a little excited that Barnes is officially on the roster. Now he has free range to completely rehaul that arm. Barnes is outfitted with a basic SHIELD issue jumpsuit—they’ll have to personalize that later—and Fury brings up the matter of a codename.

“If I could submit for consideration, the Winter Soldier,” Barnes suggests.

Beside Tony, Steve makes the weirdest noise that’s some kind of cross between a shriek, a laugh, and a snort, but by the time he’s turned his head to gape at her, her expression is neutral, if a little bit strained.

Fury is looking at her like she’s lost her mind, but he asks Barnes, “Why Winter Soldier?”

Barnes shrugs. “No reason.”

``

“This is a bad idea,” Steve says, her arms wrapped around her front to conserve body heat as she looks up the snow-covered hill.

“No, this is a great idea,”Howard says beside her. Fundamentally against the cold, he’s bundled up like he’s going on an Arctic expedition. One gloved hand is clutching at a bottle of whiskey. He takes a swig and passes it on to Steve. The alcohol does her no good—she can’t get drunk, and alcohol actually lowers core body temperature rather than warming a person up—but Howard always brings in the good stuff, and she’s not about to turn down a decent drink out in these woods.

“He’s going to break his neck,” Steve says.

“He’ll be fine,” Howard says, shuffling closer to grab the bottle back. “How you doing up there, Barnes,” he bellows.

“Buttering up,” Bucky yells back down.

Steve drops her face into her hands, but she can’t help the smile that stretches her lips. If they don’t get court marshaled for this one, then they really are untouchable. She’s not sure she wants to see how big Howard’s head gets if that’s the case.

“Does he at least have some padding,” Steve asks.

“I sacrificed my pillow for the cause,” Howard says. “He’s supposed to have stuffed it down his coat. That’ll protect the internal organs well enough.”

It happens with Bucky’s cry of “FOR BROOKLYN!” that echoes through the woods around them. Steve and Howard watch with glee as Bucky comes flying down the hill, balanced on the back of Steve’s shield, white powder kicked up in his wake. He weaves and dodges around trees in smooth, sharp meanders. It’s amazing and looks like a lot of fun until Bucky hits a mostly buried root and loses his balance near the foot of the hill.

By some miracle, when he falls, he still lands on the shield, but there’s no more control, and he goes barreling across the snow and into the camp far too fast. With a scream, he crashes into the showers, taking the tent down and leaving only the stall where Colonel Phillips is bathing.

“Oh, shit,” Howard whistles, and Steve buries her face in his shoulder with a wince. “Yowza, Steve, you should see this. His face is getting really red.”

The dressing down they receive is even worse than the time Maria convinced them to steal that tractor a few miles outside of London. Philips screams himself purple, and Steve worries for a moment that he’ll actually shoot Howard when the contractor asks with wide eyes if he can poke the vein in Philips’s forehead. In the end, Philips does his usual spurting about how much he’d love to throttle Howard but can’t since he isn’t Army and how Steve needs to watch it because she’s always on thin ice, what with being a woman out on the front. Bucky is punished by being put on patrol duty with Dum Dum, which Bucky whines has to be against the Geneva Conventions.

“Those apply to the wounded, buddy,” Howard informs him later.

Bucky points sharply to the cut across his forehead that Steve is cleaning and bandaging. “Fat lot of good your stinking pillow did me, Stark,” he grumbles.

“My pillow protected your guts and all that other important stuff. You should have found something else to save your face.”

“That’s not the—ow, shit, Steve!”

“Stop squirming around,” she snaps back, grabbing his jaw a bit more roughly than is strictly necessary to keep him still while she dabs the cut with iodine. “You could have broken your neck.”

Bucky huffs, “I seem to recall you laughing before that tree root actively tried to murder me.”

“And, hey, you should give us more credit,” Howard says, crowding over them. “We were smart enough to test the practical uses of the shield as a sled in the winter as opposed to summer.”

Bucky tries to nod, but Steve’s iron grip keeps him still. “This would have been a lot uglier without all that snow to cushion the fall.

“Before or after you bodily demolished the showers,” Steve comments dryly.

“The snow is your element, Barnes,” Howard says sagely. “Winter is your ally. The frosty plains on which you ride, sir knight, on yonder star spangled sled.”

Maria, when they tell her and Peggy the story on their next shore leave, decides that calling Bucky the Noble Knight of the Winter Hills is too much of a mouthful and, after some trial and error, eventually shortens it to the Winter Solider.

Philips is decidedly less than pleased to see the five of them having sledding races through the streets of London with all of the old prototype shields Howard hasn’t managed to scrap yet.


End file.
